Aliyah 111: Israeli Graduation Style

Where to start?

Let’s use an analogy.

American graduation:

Israeli Graduation:

Any questions?

Back in My Day …

We practiced over and over walking in line to music from the high school building to the football field. We practiced moving our tassels from the left to the right (or right to left?) all together and throwing them in the air at once. In the band, we sat in specific places on the bleachers so we could uniformly exit from the bleachers to our band seat joining the rest of the band and play the pre-prepared and well-rehearsed music. We heard a speech from the salutatorian … not the valedictorian because she already accepted some nerd position starting early at some nerd thing which was more important than graduation. (Seems I have unresolved resentment.) I remember the one who did speak referring to the final episode of Seinfeld for some reason.

Then … in everything from pre-school to college to law school graduation the tradition is to call one person up at a time, each person walks across the stage, shakes some administrator’s hand he just met, receive the diploma in a nice, covered leather … cover, pose for a picture, and go smiley back to your seat.

Israel graduation

“Where are we supposed to go?” says many a graduate. The principal is working the crowd asking questions like, “What’s your name? Klein? No! You are a gadol!” Oy.

Finally, they tell the girls to come down and sit on the ground. Did they forget to reserve seats for them? One will never know. They gleefully find their … seats … and act like they’re at a campfire cookout and small groups can start cheers at will. (Now I’m curious what they do at campfiires.)

I snapped the above picture from the side … the principal kindly looked at me for the picture in the middle of giving a speech to the crowd of hundreds. It was a controlled fire.

Also, no tickets or limits on how many people you can bring because they have a huge outdoor stadium with plenty of seats … and predictable weather. This is what happens when religious schools are part of a regular well-funded school system:

They have more educational things available to them than I did in my secular American high school. I thought only those had well stocked science labs. Here, there’s different types of science labs.

The fun never stops. The principal is also a musician with a very nice singing voice.

Some other people speak about something – my Hebrew isn’t good enough to really know what was going on:

Some more speeches, some people from the ministry of something on video speak … a long time.

At the end of that, here’s diploma receiving time with accidently putting my camera into portrait mode – which came out interesting:

Here’s another picture:

It works like this … “Okay, time to get diplomas…” and they start calling out girls’ names seemingly alphabetically (for which my family takes a huge hit by moving to Israel) though then not. Each girl goes to get her paper bag … then hmm… they just call out names faster and faster and the whole crowd is there for some reason.

The paper bag? It’s white. It’s a nice looking paper bag.

Then … okay, whatever, fine your paper bag and go. Ooo… what’s in the goodie bag?

Why, it’s a diploma, of course.

I assume they called out her name eventually …